Legends of Fairies and Sea-Folk
64a (Dancing in the Fairy Hill) SA 1971/303 A8. Recorded from Archie MacKellaig, Glenfinnan, Lochaber by Alasdair MacDougall, a Morar man living in Corpach, who told us the story as he had learned it from Mr MacKellaig when we visited him in 1972, and then found us his own recording, made about Christmas a year or two earlier at a ceilidh in the storyteller’s house. STT No. 47a. By 1972 Mr MacKellaig, a notable tradition-bearer, was eighty-eight years old and thought too frail to be recorded by us. This is clearly a practised version, not perhaps as formal in language as one learned straight from a book, but careful to include all the details of the plot and provide credible dialogue. The type, F22, is rare outside the Highlands and Islands of Scotland: we know of no Irish versions, but there is a similar tale from Denmark and several versions of one from Wales where the main difference is that the fairies are dancing outside in a ring and simply disappear with one man. The story is very often associated with a named ‘fairy hill’ in many parishes of the Central Highlands. The man who goes into the fairy hill is either one of two, rescued as here by his companion after a year, or in a variant, one or occasionally more men go in and emerge after a hundred years or so, as in the next story. See SS 24:44–5 for a brief discussion of the type by AJB: a full treatment by AJB is due to be published in Bèaloideas vol. 61 or 62.
64b The Fiddler of Gord SA 1974/204 B1. Recorded from George P. S. Peterson, Brae, Shetland by AJB. Tune recorded from him by Peter Cooke, SA 1977/114, and transcribed by AJB. T26:104–5. George Peterson was born and brought up on the island of Papa Stour, though his working life as a schoolmaster until he retired a few years ago was spent on the Shetland Mainland, and his much admired poetry, storytelling and fiddle-playing (he also played the tune transcribed with the story) all centre on his native island and the adjacent West Side of the Mainland. He has practised storytelling both to his family and in public, and has twice been a guest performer at the Netherbow storytelling festival in Edinburgh, as well as contributing two stories to Ernest Marwick’s Folklore of Orkney and Shetland (FOS, 1975). He told this story in impressive hushed tones. In fact he did not learn the plot of the legend directly from oral tradition, though his father came from the district of Sandness opposite Papa Stour, where it is set, but found both story and tune in The Shetland News of 8th January 1963, where ‘Sigurd o’ Gord’ was contributed by ‘JPSJ’, according to George Peterson a Shetlander who had emigrated to New Zealand. This tale combines the other variant of F22, related to another Shetland tale of long absence in the otherworld, ‘The Bridegroom and the Skull’ (GMK:68–71, cf. AT 470A), with two other themes known in Shetland, the fiddler asked to play for the fairies or trows (often at a fairy wedding) and the tune overheard from the fairies. Dialect words, forms and phrases include: büddie o sillocks an waand: basket of young coalfish and rod; faan: fallen; fae: from, since; fand: found; flöir: floor; güd furth: went out; keel: kale, cabbage; knowe: knoll, hillock; laach: laugh; Merry Dancers: Aurora Borealis; peerie: little; qu(ha)ar, quere: where; quite: white; shaa: show; shair: chair, bench; spok: spot; taen, teen: taken; t’oucht: thought; trows: trolls, fairies; wal: well; yaird daek: kailyard dyke, cabbage-patch wall. Hissel (strees on last syllable) : himself; humph: a hump or a hunchback; plantia: plantation, wood.
65 The Humph at the Fit o the Glen and the Humph at the Heid o the Glen SA 1955/153 A4. Recorded from Mrs Bella Higgins, Blairgowrie, Perthshire, and transcribed by Hamish Henderson. SS 10:89–92; STT No. 48. Mrs Higgins, born Isabella Stewart, was an older sister of Andrew, John and Alec Stewart and daughter of old John (see above, notes to tales Nos. 9 and 30b) and a fine storyteller herself, as well as hostess of many ceilidhs recorded by Hamish Henderson and Maurice Fleming in the 1950s. This expertly told story is one she learned from her mother, born Agnes MacPhee, though her children often claimed she was a Campbell (see the end of tale No. 69a above). The legend is often more precisely localised than here, but it is so widely known (from Japan, where a boil on the cheek replaces the hunch back, to South America) and is so like a ‘fairy-tale’ with its helpful fairies that it is catalogued with Märchen as AT 503. Many Gaelic versions have been recorded in Scotland and Ireland, nearly all based on the completion or spoiling of a song naming days of the week (in other countries all that the first hunchback may have to do is join in the dance). Gaelic versions normally begin with Monday, Tuesday (Diluain, Dimàirt), and Wednesday completes the song; the mistake is to go on to Friday, unlucky to fairies as well as Christians – but cf. T26:106–9, from Flora Boyd, Barra, where the mistake is to mention Sunday to non-Christian fairies. Scots travellers seem just to have chosen days for their sound (cf. KBA: 53–4, from Mrs Higgins’ brother John Stewart), but they sing out the words to a clear tune, where nearly all the Gaelic recordings I know have a vague chant – though Flora Boyd, a fine singer, has more indication of a tune. Hissel (stress on last syllable): himself; humph: a hump or a hunchback; plantin: plantation, wood.
66a (The Thirsty Ploughman) SA 1968/183 A5. Recorded from Mrs Kate Dix, Berneray, Harris and transcribed by Ian Paterson. STT No. 49; T20:132–5 (with Gaelic text); F111. Though it is normally said to be dangerous to taste fairy food or drink, it is worse to wish for something (cf. tale No. 61 above) and then refuse it when it is hospitably offered. Buttermilk (the liquid left after butter was churned) was always said to be good for quenching a thirst.
66b (The Hungry Ploughman) Donald John MacDonald MS 1:11–12. Recorded from his father Duncan MacDonald on 1st May 1953 (see above, note to tale No. 18) T25:14–15 (with Gaelic text). Translation by Mrs Peggy McClements. Gaelic annlan, Scots ‘kitchen’ means anything like cheese, butter, eggs or meat eaten with a staple like bread or potatoes. This story is generally told about buttermilk in Gaelic, but probably the first version ever published is a variant from the south-west of Scotland, contributed by the poet Allan Cunningham to Cromek’s Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song (London 1810:301) where the fairies spread a ‘green table’ with cheese, bread and wine as a reward for ploughing in a circle well clear of a fairy thorn-tree.
67 The Tale of the Cauldron SA 1966/16 A1. Recorded from Calum Johnston, Barra, by DAM. STT 50; T13:196–201 (with Gaelic text). This adds some details, like the ‘fairy way of moving’ (siubhal sìdhe), to the version also set in ‘Sanntraigh’, PTWH No. XXVI; the legend (F98) is also localised in Lewis and Raasay. Again there is a contradiction: fairies generally fear iron, but they can use this cauldron (the word is perhaps too grand for the ordinary ‘three-taed pot’ or ‘kettle’ which hung on a pot-chain over every croft fire in the last century), though the mention of cold iron in the rhyme may have helped to get it back safe and full of bones to make soup (again, fairy food which was harmless). The second rhyme is particularly interesting: ‘tuneful’ may refer to the ringing of the pot against the doorpost, ‘dumb’ to the fact that the woman said nothing, but does ‘Land of the Dead’ (not in other versions) merely mean mortals? Had she used the name of God and blessed the brugh (cf. note to tale No. 17 above for this word) it might have disappeared, but the dogs could not have harmed her.
68 (Baking in Creag Hàstain) SA 1957/84/2. Recorded from Donald MacDougall, North Uist by DAM. STT No. 52. This story (F54) is definitely a local legend. Like tale No. 64 above it is localised in numerous reputed fairy dwellings; in Uist Creag Hàstain, a remarkable rock rising from the machair at Paible, though not named here, is the site usually mentioned, and the descendants of the woman involved are still known as incredibly fast workers. The secret of her escape involves not doing the normal thing, which was to make a little oatcake (bonnach fallaid) out of any meal left over from making full-sized oatcakes. ‘No thrifty wife would think of dusting the baking-board into the meal girnel’, according to Dwelly’s Dictionary (s.v.fallaid) – but this was just what she had to do, though other versions (e.g. a Harris version in SSH:67) may suggest otherwise. The fairy who gave her good advice is out of place in legend as against wonder-tale, and pays
for it.
69a Johnnie in the Cradle SA 1955/151 B11. Recorded from Andrew Stewart, Perthshire traveller, by Hamish Henderson and transcribed by him for the University of Edinburgh’s School of Scottish Studies’ first set of discs. STT No. 53. A typically racy telling of one of the commonest changeling tale-types in Gaelic and Scots, F62. Andrew Stewart evidently had not heard of the itinerant tailors who stayed in houses, so he explains this character as an obliging neighbour. In Gaelic versions the changeling, once it has betrayed that it is a fairy replacing the human baby, is generally simply thrown into the fire, or a river: some Lowland accounts say the changeling was roasted on a girdle over the fire, and only cairds as far as I know mention adding dung on the girdle – it sounds here as if just heating the dung was enough, but Betsy Whyte’s more circumstantial account (T27:174) makes it clear that this is a toned-down version. The end should be the reappearance of the real child in the cradle. The message of the story should be that before treating a child that cries a lot and does not grow in this way, you should wait for it to betray itself by something like playing pipe tunes on a straw, but in fact some children at least seem to have had narrow escapes (see T27:172 note). Haudin: holding; press: cupboard; wean: child.
69b (A Fairy Changeling) SA 1981/34 B. Recorded from Nan MacKinnon, Vatersay, by Barbara McDermitt in English; published with a rather longer Gaelic text from the same tape in T38:20–23. This gives a credible ending for an island setting to what is basically the same story as the one above: the belief is apparently that fairies could not cross salt water (as they could not cross running water), and an earlier recording of the story in Gaelic makes it clear that the fairy man who had pretended to be the baby had to be taken off the rock by boat to exchange for the real baby, which the Gaelic explains had been taken when the woman left it alone in the house.
70a (A Woman Saved from the Fairies) SA 1966/16 B4–17 Al. Recorded from Angus MacLellan, South Uist, by DAM. STT No. 54a; T27:164–73 (with Gaelic text). This is a legend type (F53) which some might put into a couple of paragraphs, told by an expert teller of longer stories, who fills in the dialogue and descriptions and even gives the hero a name, though the scene is away on the mainland and the only place-name is Edinburgh. In other versions the hero merely has to throw his cap at an eddy of dust on the road to make the fairy abductors drop the woman, she recovers her speech gradually by herself, and the changeling (or ‘Devil’) left in her place is not mentioned – often an abducted woman is thought to be dead, the fairies having made a facsimile body out of wood. The woman’s dilemma at the end, whether to go back to the husband she has hardly known or stay with the man who took so much trouble to bring her back to normal, is often more stressed than here, and either choice is possible. The theft of a cup from the fairies (ML 6045) is often a separate story.
70b (A Dead Wife among the Fairies) SA 1967/112 B3. Recorded from Sydney Scott, North Ronaldsay by AJB on 5th October 1967. STT No. 54b. Sydney Scott, stay-at-home youngest son of a remarkable family, crofter, piermaster, road foreman and general Mr Fix-It for the island, mostly recorded songs for me, but this story among others came up in a session of reminiscence with a returned native which was going on one evening when I called in. Sydney’s sister Mary A. Scott published a version in her book Island Saga (Aberdeen n.d. [1968]): 155–6). This is a memorate rather than a migratory legend, definitely a local if not a family tradition, but it underlines the fact that the survival of a pagan belief in the fairies as guardians of the dead, or some of them, extended beyond the Gaelic-speaking area. Wardro is evidently a version of warto, which according to Hugh Marwick’s dictionary of The Orkney Norn is ‘a stone pillar used by herd-boys for shelter in North Ronaldsay’, a very bare, flat island. The ‘new’ lighthouse at the north end of the island was built in 1854. The combination of the Christian Bible, the pagan sacrifice of a black cat at the entrance to the underworld at full moon, and the staff to fight with the fairies, as local shamans in several parts of the Highlands including Orkney are said to have done, protecting their communities by night, in the last century (see T26:103) is a remarkable mixture of beliefs.
71 (A Man Lifted by the Sluagh) SA 1953/28/1. Recorded from Angus MacMillan, Griminish, Benbecula, by Calum Maclean. T39:146–9 (with Gaelic text). Angus MacMillan (known as ‘Aonghus Barrach’ because his ancestors came from Barra) a crofter and carter who had ‘had little schooling and [had] forgotten it all but remembered every story he ever heard’, told the longest stories Calum Maclean ever recorded (see T31:64) but hardly the most interesting: he specialised in prosy novellas with no magic in them, spun out to great lengths largely by carrying the technique Angus MacLellan uses in tale No. 70a above of reconstructing conversations between the characters to extremes. Most of Calum’s recordings of him were recorded on Ediphone cylinders for the Irish Folklore Commission and erased after transcription, and this unusually brief legend (F34) is one of very few tape-recorded from him for the University of Edinburgh’s School of Scottish Studies. The sluagh or fairy host was believed to carry people off through the air for great distances, and those who told their own stories often said they had been made to throw fairy arrows or elfshots (identified as prehistoric flint arrowheads) and kill or injure people or animals: this was evidently most effective from a mortal’s hand, though as here the narrators of such stories often claimed to have deliberately missed the target (SSH: 27, 68–70, 88–9; FTFL:120–25).
72 (A Man with a Fairy Lover) SA 1965/6 B9. Recorded from Nan MacKinnon, Vatersay, by DAM and Lisa Sinclair. T28:204–7 (with Gaelic text). The fairy lover (leannan sìdhe) of aristocratic men appears in Gaelic literature from early times. This story crams in a cocktail of motifs from all sorts of sources. The boat caught with a line was in tale No. 18 above and goes back ultimately to one of the oldest Irish tales, ‘The Voyage of Bran’; the name from tale No. 61 above floats in for no apparent reason (unless the hero is the MacPhee from Mingulay who was one of Nan’s ancestors); the birth delayed by witchcraft also appears in tale No. 79 below; the solution got by asking about an animal instead of a woman is in tale No. 73b below; and the belt put on a stone instead of a woman appears in a witch story (SS 11:22) which has parallels both in legends from the Alps and Old Irish myth. The pearlwort (mungan), like the bog-violet (mòthan) was valued as protection against fairy charms.
73a (The Fairy Suitor Foiled) SA 1968/184 B6. Recorded from Mrs Kate Dix, Berneray, Harris and transcribed by Ian Paterson. STT No. 55a; T20:128–9 (with Gaelic text). While men could have fairy lovers and still live in the ordinary world, women risked being carried off to the fairy hill by their fairy suitors – as they would leave home with a mortal husband, but in this case their families would never see them again, and they would lose any hope of salvation as Christians. This story follows a pattern more usual in stories of witchcraft, where a charm intended for a human is given to an animal. See T1:11–13 for a very similar North Uist tale where hairs from a goat’s beard replace a lock of a girl’s hair and a Shetland variant with quite different details: the story can be traced back to 1591 when the London pamphlet Newes from Scotland recorded that ‘Dr Fian’, the schoolmaster accused with the North Berwick witches, was said to have been followed by a cow whose hairs he had been given instead of a girl’s.
73b (Keeping Out the Sea Man) SA 1971/ 262 A2. Recorded from James Henderson, South Ronaldsay/Burray, Orkney by AJB. STT No. 55b; 726:100–101. As in the story above, here too a cow’s tail hair and a girl’s hair replace each other, but in the reverse order: the story can be assigned to ML 6000, ‘Tricking the Fairy Suitor’, which in Norway involves a land fairy and a herbal cure to keep away a fairy bull. This one Orkney version, versions collected from two storytellers in Co. Mayo, Ireland, and the many Norwegian and Swedish parallels are discussed in a paper by Séamas Ó Catháin, Béaloideas 59:145–59. ‘Sea people’ in Orkney were under-sea dwellers who did not necessarily take the form of seals in the sea: see another story from the south end of South Ronaldsay, T26:9
6–7, where a sea man suitor with a ‘sea skin’ is killed with the iron coulter of a plough, and discussion in TGP: 120–23.
74 MacCodrum’s (Seal) Wife SA 1968/212 Bl. Recorded from Donald MacDougall, North Uist, by Angus John MacDonald. T8:258–63 (with Gaelic text); STT No. 56. For the importance of beach-combing cf. tales No. 3a and 29 above. The basic idea of the legend appears in various forms throughout the world, notably in the ‘swan-maiden’ form incorporated in tale No. 10 above, ‘The Green Man of Knowledge’. On the east coasts of Ireland and Scotland the type (F75) may be told of a mermaid whose fish-tail (English ‘slough’, Gaelic cochull) the man steals, as in Betsy Whyte’s version, T23:273–4. On the west coasts and in the islands from Ireland to Iceland the story is about a seal-skin: though Christiansen gave it a type number (ML 4080) he can only cite one Norwegian version, and the distribution suggests an origin for this form in the British Isles, but we await publication of a definitive study from Dublin, probably in Béaloideas 60. The story is associated with the family to which the North Uist bard John MacCodrum belonged in Uist, with the Conneely family and others in Ireland (FLI No. 21), but not with any particular family in Orkney and Shetland, though the legend, including the hiding-place in the corn-stack, was well-known there.
Scottish Traditional Tales Page 47
